Matisse, Henri, 1869-1954
Variant namesMatisse was born in 1869 to generations of weavers in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, a northern French town whose woolen mills constituted the main industry. He was raised in nearby Bohain, famous for its luxury fabrics. This early exposure to textiles would shape his visual language: examples from his own collection of carpets and cloths from Europe, Africa, and the Middle East would deeply inform his sense of color and pattern and appear in his compositions.
Taking up painting after first studying law, Matisse studied with the Symbolist Gustave Moreau and participated in Paris’s official Salons. His breakthrough as an artist came during the summers of 1904 and 1905, when the bright sunlight of the South of France inspired him—along with artists like André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck—to create optically dynamic works of bright, clashing colors that led to these artists being derided with the epithet fauves (wild beasts). Known as Fauvism, the work from this period set him on a career-long path that he described as “construction by colored surfaces.”3 This approach remained central through the various stages of Matisse’s body of work—from his rigorous, abstracted paintings of the 1910s to the decorative, sunlit interiors of his so-called “Nice period” of the 1920s to the radically innovative cut-outs of his last decade.
Role | Title | Holding Repository | |
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referencedIn | Albert Loeb & Krugier Gallery. Matisse, Henri, 1869-1954 : artist file. | The Barnes Foundation, Barnes Foundation Libraries and Special Collections | |
referencedIn | Alexander Liberman photography archive, circa 1925-1998, undated | Getty Research Institute | |
referencedIn | Alfred Hamilton Barr papers | Archives of American Art | |
referencedIn | Artists collection, ca. 1902-1939. | Stanford University. Department of Special Collections and University Archives | |
referencedIn | Autograph File, M | Houghton Library | |
referencedIn | Ballets Russes collection, 1911-1962. | Museum of Performance & Design | |
referencedIn | Barr, Alfred Hamilton, 1902-1981. Alfred H. Barr, Jr. papers, 1927-1984. | Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas J. Watson Library | |
referencedIn | Bignou Gallery. Bignou Gallery Albums, circa 1930s-1940s. | Frick Art Reference Library of The Frick Collection | |
creatorOf | Church, Ralph Withington. Ralph Withington Church papers, [ca. 1926-1955] | UC Berkeley Libraries | |
creatorOf | Claribel and Etta Cone letters | Archives of American Art |
Role | Title | Holding Repository | |
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referencedIn | Oral history interview with Nicholas Krushenick | Archives of American Art | |
referencedIn | Oral history interview with Peter Agostini | Archives of American Art |
Filters:
Relation | Name |
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associatedWith | Agostini, Peter. |
associatedWith | Ballets russes. |
associatedWith | Barr, Alfred Hamilton, 1902- |
associatedWith | Bell née Stephen, Vanessa, 1879-1961 |
associatedWith | Bignou Gallery. |
associatedWith | Carrière, Eugène, 1849-1906. |
associatedWith | Cézanne, Paul, 1839-1906. |
associatedWith | Chachaut, Lucien. |
associatedWith | Chapman, Elizabeth Fuller. |
associatedWith | Church, Ralph Withington. |
Person
Birth 1869-12-31
Death 1954-11-03
Male
French
French
Variant Names
Shared Related Resources
Matisse, Henri, 1869-1954
Matisse, Henri, 1869-1954 | Title |
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